Jennifer Wilson

I carry an AA battery pack as backup with rechargeable NiMH cells, plus regular AAs for emergency use. Many handhelds have 12V connectors for external power and can also use AA/AAA battery packs.

velcro cable ties are your friend here. i wrap the coax in like 3 foot sections with velcro ties every few feet. then when you get to the summit you just undo the ties and it lays out pretty clean. also helps to coil it the same direction every time - i learned that the hard way after years of just stuffing it in randomly

yeah the 10 meter opening has been crazy good, ive been working stations almost every afternoon this week and some of the paths have been surprising. got a JA station yesterday at like 3pm local time which i wasnt expecting at all on that band. on the Icom thing — someone on one of the Facebook groups posted what looks like it might be an FCC ID filing leak, people think it could be a successor to the 705 or something in that family but honestly who knows, it could be anything. i'll believe it when i see the actual press release. Icom tends to keep stuff pretty locked down until they're ready. the 60 meter stuff i havent dug into yet, bookmarked the bulletin to read tonight. that band always felt a little complicated to me with the fixed channels and coordination requirements, so changes there would be interesting.

honest answer — a yagi is going to walk all over a collinear for that kind of path, theres really no comparison once you get past maybe 40 miles on 2m with typical terrain. a decent 5 or 6 element yagi like an M2 or even a homebrewed one from the ARRL handbook is going to give you 10+ dBd over that x50 which is already a solid antenna. the collinear route tops out eventually and you start hitting diminishing returns fast. the coax run thing is a real consideration though. if youre running more than about 50 feet of RG8X on 2m you want to think hard about that. LMR400 or similar low loss line makes a noticeable difference especially if the run is long. i did basically the same setup two years ago, ran LMR400 up to a yagi pointed at a distant linked repeater and the difference was immediately obvious. kept the x50 on a separate port for local stuff. duplexer setup isnt that bad honestly, just make sure you get one rated for both bands if you want to use both at once.

yeah i went through the same thing a few months ago. i used both hamstudy and the arrl general book and i think having the book helped me actually understand whats going on instead of just memorizing answers, but honestly either way works for passing the test one thing i wasnt ready for was how much HF operating is just kind of different from repeater stuff, like nobody is really holding your hand and you have to figure out band conditions and where to actually find people talking. 40 meters is a good starting point i think, lots of activity and the antenna requirements arent too crazy if you dont have a huge yard

i did the same mod on mine about a year ago but honestly my main motivation was just that i wanted to see if i could do it without bricking the thing lol. no real scientific method involved. cold solder joints on the PA board are actually pretty common from what ive read, worth checking those regardless of whatever else you're doing in there.

so i've been watching videos about WWFF for a while now and finally pulled the trigger on activating a local nature reserve near me last saturday. KFF reference, took me forever to figure out the whole reference lookup process on the wwff.us site but i got there eventually. ended up making 23 contacts on 40m with my kx2 and a wire thrown up in a tree, which i think is enough to count as a valid activation? i read somewhere you need 44 but also saw something about 10 being the minimum and now im confused. the park was beautiful though, set up near a little creek and had the whole place to myself for like 3 hours. anyway my main question is about logging — do i need to upload to both LotW AND the wwff logbook separately or does one feed the other? and is there a specific adif tag i need to include so it shows up correctly in their system. i didnt tag my contacts with the sig/sig_info fields and now im worried none of it will count.

okay so i just got my technician last month and ive been making contacts on 10m and 2m and people keep asking me if im on LoTW or eQSL and honestly i dont really understand the difference. like i set up a LoTW account because someone told me to but i havent actually uploaded anything yet because i cant figure out the certificate thing. and then theres eQSL which seems easier but someone at the club said it doesnt count for awards? and then some people still send actual paper cards through the bureau and i got a couple in the mail last week which was honestly pretty cool. so my question is basically — do i need all three? is one better than the others for DXCC or whatever awards people go for? i dont even know if im chasing awards yet but i figured i should probably be confirming contacts properly from the start so i dont regret it later. any advice would be really appreciated, still learning all this stuff

the igate thing is probably your issue, or at least part of it. a lot of igates are receive-only, they'll pull your packets off RF and push them to the APRS-IS network fine, but they wont inject messages back down to RF for delivery. you need a two-way igate near you and near your buddy for the messaging to actually close the loop. you can check on aprs.fi — click on the igate near you and see if it says TX igate or just RX. if its RX only then your messages are going to the internet but theres no way for them to come back down to his radio. also worth double checking that you have messaging enabled on the D710, theres a setting in the menu somewhere that can be off by default i think. been a while since i messed with mine but i remember being confused by that early on too.

yeah im kinda in the same boat as you actually, been at it for about 6 weeks now. what i do is practice with the app during my commute and then i try to listen to the cw beacon on 10 meters when its open just to hear what real signals sound like vs the clean tones in apps. the app stuff is great but actual on air signals have qrn and fading and stuff and its a totally diffrent experience tbh. someone told me about the cwops cw academy which is free and has actual instructors but i havent signed up yet, thier waitlist seemed long when i checked

yeah the batching thing is still how it works. basically when a callsign becomes available after a silent key there's a waiting period before anyone can grab it — i think its something like 5 years from the date the license cancels, and then when you apply it goes into a pool with anyone else who applied during that same application window. if multiple people apply for the same call they do a tiebreaker based on license class and other factors, its not just first-come first-served which trips a lot of people up. as far as minimum time holding your current call — there isnt one as far as i know. you can apply for a vanity basically as soon as your license shows up in the ULS. just make sure the call you want is actually in a pool your license class qualifies for, general cant hold an extra class 1x2 in most cases i believe. worth double checking that part before you get your heart set on a specific call.

the 891 is a great starting point. one thing a lot of people overlook is documentation — like printed copies of local repeater frequencies, your served agency contacts, ICS forms if your group uses those. you'd be surprised how often people have all the radio gear and zero paperwork and then cant remember a phone number when the cell network is down. also consider a small notebook computer or tablet loaded with stuff offline, winlink setup if your group does that, maybe fldigi. not saying you need all that day one but its worth thinking about where you want to eventually go with it. start simple, get the core stuff working reliably, then add layers. a kit thats half finished but fully tested beats a fancy one that you havent actually practiced with

honestly i went through almost the exact same rabbit hole last winter. ended up just throwing an arduino nano in between the pi and the relays as kind of a dumb IO expander — it handles the 5v logic for the relays, takes simple serial commands from the pi, and i dont have to worry about the gpio voltage stuff at all. probably overkill but i had a spare nano sitting on my desk doing nothing so whatever. the direwolf aprs side is rock solid for me too. only thing i'd say is watch your audio interface — i was using the built in pi audio and getting occasional decode misses, switched to a cheap USB sound dongle and it got noticeably better. something about the onboard audio being electrically noisy near all the other stuff on the board i think.

the baofeng manual thing is a real struggle lol, i went through the same exact confusion when i started. one thing that helped me was just finding someone local who already had the repeater programmed and asking them to share the settings. most clubs have a programming file you can just load in if you have the cable. also worth mentioning — some repeaters require you to have a tone to access them at all, so if you're transmitting without the tone encoded youll just get nothing back. others are open and don't care. so if you transmitted without the tone first that might explain it

the bass rolloff thing is real and it actually matters a lot for SSB. voice intelligibility on a 2.4 or 2.8 kHz passband is almost entirely in the 300 to 3000 Hz range and if you're pumping a lot of energy below 300 Hz it's just eating up your power budget without doing anything useful for readability. worse it can cause splatter if the low end is pushing your ALC around. on the 7300 specifically there's a built in TX equalizer that's actually pretty decent. i'd start there before buying anything. cut below 300 Hz, maybe boost a little around 1.5 to 2 kHz for presence and see what you get. the other thing people sleep on is mic gain — most guys run it too high and then wonder why their audio sounds compressed and distorted. watch your ALC meter and keep it barely moving, like just kissing the bottom of the range. that alone probably fixes half your problem. the speech processor on the 7300 is usable but subtle, dont crank it expecting miracles. it helps on marginal paths but too much and you start sounding like a robot and people will actually copy you worse not better.

Try implementing automatic frequency correction using a GPS disciplined reference. I built one using a NEO-8M GPS module that corrects the Si5351 every 30 seconds. Overkill for most applications but rock solid for weak signal work.

so ive been a General for about 3 years now and i keep going back and forth on whether to bother with the Amateur Extra. like i mostly just do HF SSB and a little digital, im not sure i actually need the extra privileges but part of me just wants to do it to say i did it, you know? my main worry is the theory sections. i looked at some practice questions on qrz and some of that stuff about impedance matching and filter design and transmission line theory just went completely over my head. i took basic electronics in high school like 20 years ago so i remember some of it but definitely not enough. someone at my club said the math isnt that bad if you just memorize the question pool but another guy said you actually need to understand it or you'll hit a wall. not sure who to beleive is there a good way to approach studying for this or did anyone else feel totally lost at first and then it clicked? also is it actually worth it just for the sub-bands or am i overthinking this

honestly teamviewer for audio is always going to be rough, that thing wasnt made for low latency audio at all. RemoteHams at least actually thinks about the RF control side of things not just screen sharing. i switched maybe two years ago and dont really look back. the rig control integration is what got me — being able to actually change the VFO and see the waterfall respond in something close to real time rather than waiting for a screen refresh felt like a completely different experience. the XYL closing the laptop thing is a real problem lol, no software fixes that one

yeah the Q codes go back to like morse code days, they were originally a way to send common phrases quickly in CW without having to spell everything out. most of the ones you'll hear regularly on HF voice aren't even being used the technically correct way anymore, people just kind of adapted them into casual speech. the ones you really need are QRM which is interference from other stations, so man-made noise basically. QRN is natural noise like static from lightning and stuff. QSB is signal fading, like when someones signal is going up and down. QRZ is asking who is calling, you'll hear that one constantly especially at the end of a CW or SSB contact when someone's listening for more callers. QRT means stopping transmission or shutting down. QRX means stand by or wait a minute. QTH is location yeah. QSL is confirming. QRP means low power, a lot of guys run QRP rigs like 5 watts or less and it becomes almost a whole subculture. for the other stuff, 73 is just the traditional sign off meaning best regards, goes back to telegraph days. 88 is love and kisses, usually said to YLs which means young lady, though it just means any female ham regardless of age. OM is old man which is just how hams refer to other male operators, not actually about age. DE is from in morse, so when you hear W1ABC DE W2XYZ it means W2XYZ calling W1ABC. once you hear it a few times it clicks pretty fast. honestly the ARRL website has a decent list and so does the back of most license study books. dont stress too much about sounding clueless, everyone was new once and most hams are pretty patient if you just say youre new

I had exactly the same problem around 10 WPM! What worked for me was using G4FON with higher character speeds but slower word spacing (Farnsworth method). you're letter spacing may be set at 8-10wpm to start out with while you're actually learning the characters at a target speed of 20wpm. This method is recommended by the ARRL and is implemented by many applications used for Morse Code training.

Went through this exact same debate about 18 months ago. Ended up keeping the 7300 and buying a used 7600 instead of the 7610, which probably wasnt the smartest move in hindsight but it made sense financially at the time. But to actually answer your question — the roofing filter difference is real, especially if you contest or work crowded band conditions. On a quiet band you probably wont notice much. On 40m during a contest weekend or when 20m is wall to wall EU stations, the 7610 handles adjacent signal rejection noticeably better than the 7300. Its not a night and day thing but its there. The dual watch on the other hand is legitimately useful if youre doing what you described. Running two separate radios is fine until youre trying to also log and suddenly you have three things fighting for your attention.

so ive been licensed about 8 months now (general) and just started getting into DX chasing which is way more addictive than i expected. somebody on a local net mentioned using cluster spotting to find active DX stations and i kind of figured it out on my own but im not totally sure im using these tools the right way. basically what im doing is i have QRZ.com open in one tab and DXwatch open in another and i just sort of bounce between them. when i see a spot on DXwatch i look up the callsign on QRZ to get more info about the entity and confirm what DXCC it is. that part seems to work ok. but theres so much going on in the cluster feed it feels overwhelming, like spots are flying by and half of them are on bands i cant even use or weird hours. is there a better workflow for this? also are there any apps people actually use on their phones for cluster spotting because staring at a scrolling webpage is kind of annoying. i tried one called DX Toolkit i think but wasnt sure if it was pulling from the right networks. just looking for how more experienced folks handle this day to day

so ive been a tech for about 8 months now and honestly i feel like ive hit a wall a little bit. i mostly just do local repeaters and some simplex stuff but i keep hearing people talk about HF and working dx and i guess i want to get in on that. my buddy pete has a general and he says the exam isnt that bad but he also said that about the tech exam and i almost failed that one lol anyway i started looking at the question pool and some of it makes sense but then theres all this stuff about propagation and operating procedures that i dont really understand. like i get the basic concept of skywave and stuff but when the questions start talking about which bands do what at different times of day my brain kind of goes sideways. is there a good way to study for this or should i just do the ham study website and grind questions until it sticks also what HF bands can i even use as a general, i looked it up but the chart i found was kind of confusing with all the sub-bands and stuff